Shroud reveals specific changes Valorant needs to improve

Star Twitch streamer Michael ‘shroud’ Grzesiek explained what he thinks Riot needs to change to improve Valorant, including an Agent with better flashes, a basic change to Operators, and more.

The former CSGO pro and longtime FPS king, shroud, has been vocal about all of the great things that Riot has accomplished with Valorant – as well as all of the game’s early shortcomings that it needs to get over.

Riot themselves are getting ready to fix some pressing issues they’ve found, like problems with Phoenix’s Curveball and possibly implementing countermeasures to stream-snipers.

But shroud thinks specific additions like a character with a potent flash against Ops and changes to Radiant would be a great way to start chipping away at Valorant’s problems.

Although there are a ton of tools for dealing with Operators, flashes from Phoenix and Breach aren’t really helpful since they’re easy to avoid.

“Imagine a Phoenix or a Breach flash,” he explained. “If you’re Op-ing a certain angle [they use a flash], chances are you can side-step and then step back in, and nothing happens.”

Shroud wants to see an Agent that can have a better time dealing with Ops, like a character than can manipulate a flashes trajectory like Jett can with her Cloudbursts.

• Read more: Riot explains why each new Valorant agent will “disrupt” the meta

But even then, that character would have a hard time dealing with the prevalence of Ops. A way to make sure there aren’t too many high-powered snipers in the game is to raise its price from 4500 credits to 5500, according to shroud.

He thinks that the way Valorant’s economy is set up, teams on a broken-buy can still make the 4500 purchase viable. But putting a higher tax on the weapon, somewhere near 5000-6000, would make people think twice due to the economical impact a bad Op purchase would have.

Finally, Radiant needs to not only be open to more than 150 slots but it also needs a way to track MMR within the highest rank to give elite players something to play toward.

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As it is, there’s not much to do once you hit Radiant, leading people to make smurf accounts. Smurfing then leads to a litany of other issues in Competitive mode, so this change could improve various aspects of the game.

Riot is planning to stick with Valorant for a long time, and it’ll be interesting to see if the studio takes heed of shroud’s ideas that could make the game better.